Human-Centred Design has served us well as an innovation strategy over the last decades, making things better for people and more profitable for business. Today there is growing and widespread concern about the impacts of all this innovation on a third ‘P’ – the Planet. To innovate for a sustainable future we must transform our model from Human-Centred to Humanity-Centred Design.
At the core of every successful business lies innovation. This innovation, however, doesn’t always have to be of internal nature in the form of a new product or an upgraded service in order to have a spectacular effect on your brand’s success.
Locked with the President of my country, Cyril Ramaphosa, in what was already a ‘do-not-disturb, bromance-in-progress’ kind of moment, he must have developed an on-the-spot inkling that our intimacy stands to grow by leaps and bounds if he were to somehow ask me what I do for a living. And in not so many words, I said what I say to just about anyone – from Long-Rich Sales Reps – to Twitter Bios – right up to C-Suite level, thick-necked folk: “I chase rats for a living.”
Abstract: A perspective of a redesigned, reformed and transformed business design professional. The author shares her journey, experience, progress, and point of view on today's often discussed "design thinking or building a design-led innovation culture."
Websites are the heart and core of every modern business. Your entire marketing efforts and promotions are supposed to lead visitors to your website and convert them into customers. In a sense, a business website is there to seal the deal. However, no matter how good your marketing efforts are, if your website isn't good enough, your potential customers will simply leave. In addition, online consumers have certain expectations when it comes to business websites, such as good functionality, speed, user-friendliness and so on.
It’s pretty much impossible to argue with Apple’s success. It’s one of the most valuable companies in the world, and has maintained dominance for its reputation as an innovative company that produces top-of-the-line hardware. Because of its products and brand reputation, Apple has gained a cult following that will buy nearly every new product that emerges, year after year. So why, even with the high price tag, are so many consumers willing to shell out for every new gadget that comes along?
Nobody doubts that design can be powerful. But while words and phrases like ‘design thinking,’ ‘agile’ and ‘lean’ may be officially welcome in the boardrooms of Deloitte, Accenture, PWc, McKinsey and similar firms, I believe that the full potential of design has been neglected and these terms misappropriated.
Why do a large part of the design thinking projects in the corporate world never pass through the prototype phase? In recent years I’ve been involved with many design thinking initiatives. Many of them related to the development of new products inside large companies in industries such as finance, health, education and consumer goods.
The list of problems that need to be solved is growing almost as fast as our solutions are. Some are concerned about the lack of food and water security, others worry about access to education and a whopping 45.2% of millennials think today’s most pressing problem is the destruction of natural resources. But with the proliferation of problems, organizations and enterprises are broadening their search for innovative solutions and many of them are looking to the crowd for ideas.
The Internet has forever changed how we work with innovation. Author Marta Domínguez spent the last five years observing the causes and effects of the digital wave and has gathered a list of 22 impacts on the world and your business.
Most “new” business models are not really “new”. Very frequently they are based on replications or re-combinations of existing business model patterns. Consequently, learning from business models from other companies and industries is a very important source of inspiration for business model innovation.
Innovation, the act of creating novelty, has become omnipresent whereas what we really need to know is how to change enterprises, how to transform them, how to make them Elastic Enterprises, urges Haydn Shaughnessy in this provocative article.
Gus Desbarats has been designing and directing award-winning, commercially successful innovation continuously, for the last 28 years, for some of the world’s top brands. Today Gus shares his insightful views on innovation management and the importance of putting people’s experiences at the heart of business and innovation.
What can design really teach business leaders about how to run their organizations? And where does it fit into the ever-evolving lexicon around innovation? Nicole Chen sketches out the top four values that business leaders should adopt from design thinking.
